Sonja Karadzic can’t help her surname, but she can help her politics

Sonja
Karadzic-Jovicevic’s emergence as a political figure highlights the crucial
juncture Bosnia and Herzegovina finds itself in in 2014, as well as the
complex, auxiliary role of female family members in post-Yugoslav ultranationalism

Srebrenica memorial ceremony, 2014. Photo: Zulfikar Filandra. All rights reserved.The news that Sonja Karadzic-Jovicevic, daughter of Radovan
Karadzic, has been chosen as a Republika Srpska parliamentary candidate in
the 2014 election comes as Bosnia and Herzegovina is at a crossroads, in a year
that has seen significant popular protests quickly followed by devastating
regional floods. In some sense, her
advent at this moment feels ominous – a figure with a loaded name and symbolic
position in the political landscape suddenly emerging out of the flux of recent
months.

Karadzic-Jovicevic cannot, of course, help who her parents
are or what her surname is. Particularly
in a post-war
political and social landscape of consociational ‘compulsory ethnic
identification’ – in which surnames can be ‘read’ as signifiers of
ethno-religious belonging, and a new generation of children are raised partly
in a segregated
education system in which lineage is destiny – the need to resist reducing individuals
to their surnames and heritages is even stronger than usual.

And Sonja Karadzic-Jovicevic isn’t the only descendant of
the 1990s wars to have entered politics in the post-war period, in which
ethnically-based political parties trade in large part on the identity
fault-lines of the war – the son of Alija
Itzetbegovic, the wartime Bosniak/ Bosnian Muslim leader of Bosnia, and
Karadzic’s political nemesis, has also risen to political prominence in the
post-war period.

This caveat acknowledged, however, the emergence of the
daughter of Radovan Karadzic as a political figure is troubling for two main
reasons – her own public statements on her father’s ‘innocence’ and
‘persecution’ by international justice, and the political geography of Bosnia
and where, specifically, she has chosen to run as a candidate. A resident of Sarajevo recently said to me:
“it’s better to treat it as a joke, laugh at how pathetic it is. Like history will repeat itself this time as
farce.” But her decision to enter
politics is significant both in terms of how the upcoming national elections in
the country may play out, and how Bosnian society and politics in the larger
sense may now be heading in the wake of the popular protests earlier this year.

Srebrenica memorial ceremony, 2014. Photo: Zulfikar Filandra. All rights reserved.During the war, Sonja Karadzic ran her father’s press
office from the wartime Bosnian Serb capital of Pale, and is well remembered
– rarely fondly – by journalists who covered the war. She has always maintained
her father’s innocence and the ‘righteousness’ of his vision for Bosnia and
Herzegovina, which in reality entailed ethnic cleansing, genocide and the 44 month
siege of Sarajevo. In an interview
with the Russian government-sponsored television station Russia Today in 2009, she reiterated her belief in her
father’s innocence and criticised the ICTY, saying “the Hague tribunal is
not a court of justice, but just some kind of disciplinary commission for NATO.”

When Sonja Karadzic-Jovicevic apologises for Radovan
Karadzic, she is denying facts that have been established at the ICTY and the
ICJ. In this context, there’s cause
for alarm both in the recent statements of Karadzic-Jovicevic and her party on
what she would stand for if elected, and the choice of Pale in particular as
the place where she will stand as a candidate. She has been nominated by her father’s party, the Serb Democratic Party,
on a campaign that aims to push for Serb solidarity, and according to news
website Balkan Insight, encourage
her voters to “think Serb.”

Moreover, she has chosen to stand as a candidate for the SDP
in Pale,
the wartime seat of her father. Today Pale
is a lacklustre town, markedly different from the cafes and cinemas of Sarajevo
just a fifteen minute drive away – although in his recent
book Ed Vulliamy recalls how “during the war, the journey could take a
whole day, from one world into another.” Karadzic-Jovicevic herself has said that it has been a special honour to
be nominated in Pale as it is “where the foundations of Republika Srpska were
laid.”

Srebrenica memorial ceremony, 2014. Photo: Zulfikar Filandra. All rights reserved.In the nineteen years since the Dayton peace accords divided
Bosnia and Herzegovina into two entities (with the exception of the Brcko
district), Pale has been in Republika Srpska, one of the two ‘entities’,
while its previously Bosnian Muslim-majority part is now in Federacija, the
other federal entity. This severing of
the country along the fault-lines of the war is mirrored in the post-war
political system and its power-sharing Presidency, in which political parties
campaign primarily on ethnic lines.

For Sonja Karadzic-Jovicevic to stand for election in Pale
this year is an unambiguous assertion of a vision of ultranationalism that was
violently enacted on the region in the 1990s – in her own words, a continuation
of her father’s work – and at the site from which her father enacted his
ultranationalist vision.

After all, Sonja Karadzic-Jovicevic trades, in large part,
on being ‘her father’s daughter’. As
such, her (re-)emergence in Bosnian politics also points to the auxiliary,
ambivalent role of women in post-Yugoslav ultranationalisms, which weaves into
its ideologies rigidly demarcated gender roles, and emphatically draws upon
these nationalist-prescribed roles through its ethno-nationalist symbol. The reverence in post-Tito Serbian
nationalism for the male soldier and ‘warrior’ was accompanied by a
fetishisation of ‘woman as mother’ who, focused on performing her primary
function of reproducing, ‘gives birth’ to the new nation. Yet despite drawing heavily on conceptions of
the mythical ‘lost Eden’ of ancient Serbia and the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, this
patriarchal vision played out in a complex manner in post-Tito modernity.

It has often been noted that post-Tito ultranationalisms
featured a number of quote-unquote ‘strong’ women at the forefront of Serbian
and Bosnian Serb politics, such as Maja Gojkovic, Mirjana Markovic
and Biljana
Plavsic. However, as feminist
theorists looking at women in right-wing movements have noted, each came either
from anti-communist, nationalist families, or (in the case of Markovic) came
from a famous communist family and self-identified as such even whilst
propagating an ultranationalist agenda and worldview.

Their rise to prominence came through ‘normative
heterofamilial lines’, in which mothers and daughters of the political elite
can nepotistically assume political positions in the absence of (preferable)
sons while the structure of patriarchy and patrilineality remains
unchallenged. Sonja Karadzic-Jovicevic –
her surname itself awkwardly marking her a hybrid of her father and husband – draws
upon this tradition and perpetuates it, just as she seeks, in her political
position, to ‘continue’ her father’s vision.

Sonja Karadzic-Jovicevic’s invisible twin is Ana
Mladic, the daughter of the Bosnian Serb military leader now on trial for
war crimes at the ICTY in The Hague. At
the height of the war in 1994, Ana Mladic committed suicide aged 23 by shooting
herself with her father’s gun. Although the daughter of an elite figure can
only ever awkwardly stand as shorthand for the experience of women outside of the elite, her death nonetheless soon became symbolic. Like the
stereotype of the teenage girl self-harming and starving herself, internalising
the horrors of the external world, Mladic’s daughter’s suicide was seen as a
response to her father’s crimes and, more broadly, the inability of women to
function in an ultranationalist climate that rigidly polices gender identity on
the one hand and rigidly demarcates ethnicity on the other.

The life of Ana Mladic has been drawn upon by feminist theorists
and novelists
using it, in various ways, as a prism for the experience of women under
ultranationalism and in war: feminist Croatian writer and journalist Slavenka
Drakulic wrote a haunting re-imagining of Ana Mladic’s final hours before her
suicide, and the private hell of her home life, stifled behind closed doors as
her father publicly concentrated on the war. The figures of the two daughters mirror each other – if Ana was apparently so
haunted by her father’s actions, why isn’t Sonja?

Academic Nastasja Vojvodic has written on how ultranationalism
and patriarchy aligned in the control of female identity and the female
body, as “while women were paradoxically liable for the life as well as
the death of their respective nations through reproduction, the women
belonging to the groups of the ethnic Other were subjugated in a corresponding
respect.” In Zarana Papic’s analysis, a nationalist state instrumentalises its ‘own’
women into “birth machines” while its ethnic opponents become targets of
destruction – destruction that plays out on gendered lines in the war from the
mass killing of boys and men in Srebrenica to the mass rapes of Bosnian and
Croatian women.

The emergence of female political figures such as
Karadzic-Jovicevic (and Gojkovic and Plavsic before her), is – when situated in
this context – no feminist victory.
Whilst acknowledging their political agency and the choices they have
made within the constraints that come of being born into political
ultranationalist families (the strain of which is seen most obviously in the life
of Ana Mladic) they primarily signal a failure of political process.

Their ascendance, both in the post-Tito war period and
today, doesn’t tell a story of female empowerment, only a story of nepotism and
kleptocracy in which wives and daughters of the elite can occasionally play at
honorary men while ultranationalist ideology enforces strict gender binaries on
politics and society as a whole.

Yet Karadzic-Jovicevic’s ascendancy now is striking because
it comes at a crucial moment for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and its upcoming national
elections. Last month, the eyes of the
international media briefly returned to Sarajevo for
the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, but in 2014 Bosnia is in turmoil beyond the headlines.

Earlier this year, the country nearly came to a standstill
in February and March after
popular protests in cities and towns across the country demanded an end to
the corrupt, ethno-nationalist political framework established by the 1995
Dayton constitution. In the direct-democracy
‘plenums’ that followed in many
cities, citizens of all ethnicities expressed a number of core concerns,
such as a desire for an end to government corruption, an end to the ‘compulsory
ethnic identification’ in public life of the consociational Dayton period, and
a desire for politicians to address the social needs of citizens, who face high
unemployment, steeply rising costs of living and inadequate public services as
their political elite focus on their own profits and stirring ethno-nationalist
tensions for electoral gain.

The floods
that devastated the western Balkans in May seem to have swept the nascent
direct democracy of the plenums away with them, and the weekly meetings of
direct democracy have petered out across the country. And although some activists involved in
organising the protests believe the experience of the plenums has initiated a
fundamental shift in political mindset among the population, others argue that fractures were already emerging
in the movement before the May floods, as the plenums attempted the difficult
task of transitioning from what they were against to articulating what they
were in favour of.

Nonetheless, their
recent impact on Bosnian politics finds the country in election year torn
between an attempt to forge new political narratives and the ghosts of the
ethno-nationalist past clinging to power in the present.

If the plenums represent the possibility of a step forward in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, or at least the possibility of life beyond the 19 year Dayton
stalemate, the ascendancy of Sonja Karadzic-Jovicevic as a political figure – and
the past that she drags with her – represents an alarming step back.

About the author

Heather McRobie is a novelist, journalist, and former co-editor of openDemocracy 50.50. She has written for Al Jazeera, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Foreign Policy, amongst others. She researches and lectures on public policy at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and previously studied at the University of Oxford, University of Bologna and University of Sarajevo. Her latest book Literary Freedom: a Cultural Right to Literature explores the issue of hate speech in literature and the philosophy of freedom of expression. Follow her on twitter @heathermcrobie

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